Mahbub S.

To begin with, borrowing from Dr. Michio Kaku's ideas, the "telephone system of a future Type 1 civilization (i.e. the Internet of the Future)" must be utterly unpredictable to members of a Type 0 civilization like us. Borrowing from Issac Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, the very knowledge of the existence of such a system in the future would prevent it from ever being developed in the first place. For us, this would mean that such knowledge of the future would prevent us from being able to make the transition from being a member of a Type 0 civilization to that of a Type 1 civilization. But this is very unlikely. It is exactly because such knowledge of the future is unobtainable that we will eventually make this transition without even being aware of it. However, I make the following predictions knowing that I will definitely be proven wrong in some way or the other sometime in the future! So here is my humble effort. According to Ray Kurzweils's "Law of Accelerating Returns", in the 21th century alone, we are going see technological change equivalent to 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). This is due to the exponential nature of technological change, as evident in the past. Applying this law, to current computing and web technologies, connection speeds and the development of new programming languages, will have profound implications. In the future, all these technologies will have advanced to the point where they will be "indistinguishable from magic", to borrow from Sir Arthur C. Clarke's terminology. In other words, after machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, we will be able to create immortal software-based versions of ourselves and upload them to the "Internet of the Future". This "Internet of the Future" will have more in common with the "Matrix" from the movie "The Matrix" than with today's Internet. It will be a complete "Simulation of Existence" made possible by almost limitless processing power and connection bandwidth, completely new web technologies and future programming languages. Humans are likely to to live dual lives in the future - one in the real world and one on the "Internet of the Future". This will almost definitely require an advanced human-machine interface, as the two entities will have to be in synchrony with each other. In order to be as intelligent and fast thinking as his/her "Digital Self", the original human will have to have undergone artificial intelligence upgrades to his/her biological body. This would be the beginning of the merger of biological and non-biological intelligence. "Visions of the future" any further than this are probably "utterly unpredictable"!